The Left-Hand Path: Disciple

by T. S. Barnett

  The Left-Hand Path: Disciple

  T.S. Barnett

  ALSO BY T.S. BARNETT

  The Beast of Birmingham

  Under the Devil’s Wing

  Into the Bear’s Den

  Down the Endless Road

  The Left-Hand Path

  Mentor

  Runaway

  Prodigy

  A Soul’s Worth

  AS TESS BARNETT

  Tales of the Tuath Dé

  Those Words I Dread

  Because You Needed Me

  To Keep You Near

  Devil’s Gamble

  Domesticated: A Short Story Collection

  In collaboration with Michelle Kay

  The Left-Hand Path: Disciple

  T.S. Barnett

  Pensacola, FL

  Copyright © 2019 T.S. Barnett

  ISBN: 0-9978615-5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9978615-5-6

  All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Cover Art by Jake Clark

  jcalebdesign.com

  Corvid House Publishing

  Dark Urban Fantasy and Science Fiction Novels

  Pensacola, FL

  http://www.hisprincelydelicates.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to thank everyone who’s been so supportive and encouraging in this journey of mine. I couldn’t live without your accolades.

  1

  “I don’t like this,” Cora said for what felt like the hundredth time. She sat in the driver’s seat of a stolen car on a dark road in the middle of Philadelphia, trying not to grip the steering wheel too tight. They’d driven all day and into the night to get there from Florida, and the entire way, she’d voiced her disapproval of the plan that she was now too late to stop. Thomas frowned softly at her from the passenger seat but didn’t speak. He’d argued just as much, but in the end, their disagreement hadn’t been enough.

  Now Nathan and Elton had disappeared inside the private residence of Gerald Lunsford, the Council Chair of the North American Magistrate. Cora could feel the pressure of the magic barriers around the massive home even as they’d driven up the street, but the two men had taken their time and broken through. It had been too long since then, and too quiet. Somebody had to be dead by now—Cora just hoped it was the person they’d intended.

  A black sedan roared down the quiet street and skidded to a stop in front of the driveway, and then another screeched into park behind it. Four men poured out of each car and raced up the lawn, but they didn’t make it to the door before a deep thud exploded inside the silent house, shattering an upstairs window and raining glass on the flinching Chasers below.

  Nathan’s name fell from Cora’s lips, but when she put her hand on the door handle, Thomas stopped her with a firm grip on her forearm.

  “You can’t help them,” he said. “They’ll come out or they won’t.”

  “But—”

  She glanced back at him for a moment, then watched helplessly as the Chasers filed through the front door of the house.

  “You’ll just die if you go in there,” Thomas pressed, and the girl went slack under his hand.

  She’d asked them not to go. She’d told them not to. Begged them not to. But Nathan was a grenade, set to explode wherever Elton aimed him—and Elton had become a hammer who only saw the Magistrate as a long row of nails. Her pleas had fallen on deaf ears.

  Cora pressed against the car window as a sheer blue barrier fell over the house and yard, silencing the shouts and crashes that had begun to sound from inside the house. She waited, fingers curled tight around the handle of the door and flinching at every subtle flash of light that made it through the protective barrier. After an eternity, a crack formed in the blue wall, and it began to slowly fade, dripping away from the top of the dome to reveal the burning house, broken windows, and scorched lawn.

  The front door scraped open on broken hinges, and a man’s figure appeared in the smoky doorway, but it wasn’t until the broader shoulders appeared behind him and the pair stumbled into the driveway that Cora was sure it was Nathan and Elton. Elton was dragging someone behind him by the collar, whom he dropped into a heap at the edge of the yard and left behind without a spare glance. Both he and Nathan were splattered with blood that soaked their clothes and flecked their faces and hair, and Nathan was laughing as he turned to walk a few steps backward and get another look at the house. He stopped Elton with a tap of his knuckles and leaned easily on the taller man’s shoulder, leaning in to say something to him that Cora had no chance of hearing.

  With one last movement of Nathan’s hand, the ground around them shook, and the center of the house gave a terrible crack, tumbling in on itself and sending up a cloud of burning dust. Nathan clapped Elton on the shoulder and walked beside him down to the street, neither of them seeming to hurry.

  Cora turned in her seat as they dropped into the back of the car and shut the doors. Nathan lifted his hips to tug his cigarette pack from his pocket and offered one to the blond beside him, who let him light them both. They’d both taken a long drag and let it out before Nathan’s eyes found Cora’s anxious face.

  “Shouldn’t you be driving, my love?” His voice was raspy and strained, but he still offered her a smile. “It’s a crime scene, you know.”

  “That’s it?” she asked, almost reaching out to slap the cigarette from his fingers. “That’s all you have to say? What the hell happened in there? Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I’m definitely bleeding out,” Nathan laughed, finally wincing as he pressed a hand to a pulsing wound on his side. “All the more reason for you to get a move on, hm?”

  “Jesus Christ,” she sighed, but she sat back in her seat and turned the key in the ignition, pulling away from the scene just as a pair of flashing blue lights began to turn the corner behind them.

  She watched Elton in the rearview mirror, but the only movement he made was to crack the car window so he could tap the ash from his cigarette and blow smoke through the gap. Nathan had always obviously reveled in the chaos he caused, but this new calm post-murder stillness in the former Chaser was unsettling. Whatever was in his head, it certainly didn’t seem to be remorse.

  She wanted to drive as fast and as far away from the house they’d left behind as possible, but Nathan’s head had begun to slump forward in the backseat. Elton had to pluck the cigarette from the other man’s hand so that he didn’t burn himself, so she pulled off at the first motel she saw outside the city and helped Thomas trade their license plate with another car’s while Elton carried Nathan over his shoulder into their room.

  “Do you think that helped?” Thomas asked her as they crouched behind the car to attach the stolen plate.

  “No,” she answered. She pushed herself up by her knees and sighed, hesitant to approach the motel room door. “I’m worried. Elton hasn’t said a word. That’s creepy, right?”

  “I’ve seen it before,” Thomas admitted with a small shake of his head. “I guess he hasn’t changed as much as he wants everyone to think.” He tilted his chin toward the door. “We’d better stitch Moore up, unless you want him to really bleed out.”

  Cora nodded, and together they made their way into the room to tend to their injured companions.

  She didn’t sleep well. Nathan was still as the dead beside her, as usual, but Thomas had preferred a blanket on the floor to sharing a bed with Elton, so she hadn’t dared to get up and disturb him. She just laid under the blanket, listening to Nathan’s slight
ly labored breath, and stared up at the ceiling. Elton still hadn’t said anything—he’d helped them clean Nathan up and sat still while Cora had smeared her poultice on his cuts and bruises, but he hadn’t offered any information about what had actually happened inside the councilman’s house. They couldn’t carry on this way—it was too crazy. Murder couldn’t just be the answer to all of their problems. Even if they did manage to kill everyone on the council, which seemed to be their plan, what then? That wouldn’t stop the Magistrate from running. It wouldn’t stop this terrible order they’d signed, which was now only five days from going into effect. It would just make the Magistrate stop doing the few good things it did do while everyone scrambled to fill the vacuum they’d created. She had to talk sense into them. She had to, somehow.

  She must have dozed off eventually, because she opened her eyes to sunlight and Nathan sitting up in bed beside her with a paper cup in his hand. Elton was shaving in the bathroom mirror, seeming little worse for wear, and Thomas was hunched on the mattress by the window to stare down at his phone. The air in the room seemed heavy, but Nathan smiled down at her as she stirred.

  “There she is,” he said gently. “Good morning, my love.”

  “Morning,” she murmured, keeping the blanket bunched up around her front as she sat up. She shook her head when he offered her a sip of his coffee. “Glad you didn’t bleed to death in the night.”

  “As am I,” he chuckled. “Due entirely to your diligent care, as always.”

  “So are you going to tell us what the hell the deal was yesterday?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “What do you mean, how do I mean?” She shoved him by the arm, and he tutted at her as he had to shift to avoid spilling his coffee. “You killed all those people, right?”

  “Not all of them,” Nathan answered defensively.

  “What?”

  “We left one Chaser outside,” Elton spoke up, wiping soap from his jaw with a towel as he leaned against the wall by the bathroom. “To tell who’d done it.”

  Cora let out a disbelieving scoff. “How...how is it a good thing for everyone to know that you two killed a member of the council?”

  “We can’t possibly tell every witch in the country that this order is happening, and even if we could, they probably wouldn’t believe it. What we can do is let the Magistrate know that Nathaniel Moore knows.”

  “Elton is learning the power of a strategic name drop,” Nathan chuckled into his cup.

  “There’s no point to putting up with your shit if we can’t even put your reputation to use sometimes.”

  “But you’ve just made it harder for us, haven’t you?” Cora pressed the balls of her hands into her temples. “We were already on the run from damn near everyone, but now you’ve killed a councilman! That’s got to be, like, the worst possible on-the-run you can be! That’s like five-stars, tanks and helicopters coming after you, GTA-wanted!”

  “It is something of a lifestyle adjustment,” Nathan admitted, but before Cora could argue further, Thomas’s voice interrupted them from across the room.

  “You idiots,” he said, and then a little louder as he turned to face them, “you fucking idiots.” He grimaced and turned his head for a moment as though biting his tongue, but then snorted in frustration and lifted his gaze back to Nathan.

  “I hardly think that’s called for—”

  “I just heard from my friend in Ottawa.” He lifted his phone with the screen toward them. “Everyone is losing their minds, so good job on that. But that councilor you just killed? He opposed the order of repression. He argued against it and was outvoted. You killed one of the good guys.”

  Cora’s heart sank. “Are you serious?” she whispered.

  “They’re holding a session today to vote on who the new chair will be, and tomorrow they’ll take nominations for the new council member. Apparently the Magister of Ontario is being mentioned.”

  “How do you know that?” Elton asked, taking a half step forward into the room.

  “My friend in Ottawa is the administrative assistant.”

  “For Hubbard?” Elton clarified.

  “Oh, him,” Nathan chuckled. “He’s the one whose son you murdered, isn’t he?”

  The blond didn’t answer him.

  “This is crazy,” Cora half whimpered. She put her face in her hands and mushed her cheeks as she dragged her palms down them in frustration. “It’s too much. We can’t do this.”

  “What else are we supposed to do?” Nathan asked. “We can’t just let them carry on.”

  “We have to help people!” she countered. “You’re talking about the government, Nathan! You can’t just...fix the government by murdering people! We can’t be everywhere at once, but we can do what we can, right? They’re still going to be looking for Thomas’s friends, and they’re going to start rounding people up no matter what we do, aren’t they?”

  “First, we need a new plan,” Elton said, far too calmly. “And we definitely need to get away from here. We need somewhere safer than a motel. We shouldn’t have stayed the night here as it is.”

  “This is exactly why I said you shouldn’t do this,” Thomas answered, rising from the mattress to face the larger man. “I told you it was a stupid idea. Cora told you it was a stupid idea. You must have known it was a stupid idea. But let’s just beat the problem to death instead of trying to solve it, like always.”

  “When you have a better idea, Thomas, you speak right up,” Elton snapped back.

  “Literally having no idea at all is better than what you two have just done!”

  “Oh my god, stop arguing!” Cora shouted, and the three men turned their eyes on her. “If I’d known you’d left a frickin’ calling card, I would have taken us farther away! In this instance—and pretty much only this one—Elton’s right. We need to find somewhere safe to hide until we can figure this out. If anybody has a suggestion, then let’s hear it, but getting angry at each other isn’t going to help anything.”

  A few moments of guilty silence passed before Elton broke it.

  “Hotel rooms aren’t going to cut it,” he said, notably more softly. “Especially not the kind of hotels you’re going to want to stay at,” he added with a pointed look at Nathan. “We can’t do that anymore. Even if Korshunov wasn’t still alive.”

  “May as well turn ourselves in,” Nathan sighed. “One of you had better be prepared to fluff my towels and make my coffee for me.”

  “How can you still be worried about creature comforts right now?” Cora asked, but Nathan only shrugged one shoulder and took a sip of his coffee. She wondered briefly if someone had made it for him and cast a narrow-eyed look at Elton.

  “We need somewhere that can be warded properly,” Elton went on. “Somewhere that can be hidden. Maybe a cabin somewhere, or—”

  “Yes,” Nathan chuckled, “a creepy cabin in the woods is just the place for a base of operations. Perhaps we could just pitch a tent on the front lawn of every Magister we plan to kill.”

  “You’d rather we keep staying in high-profile hotels that are going to guarantee we get raided constantly, just so you can get your morning swim in?”

  “You’d be disappointed if I began to lose my handsome figure, darling.”

  “I have a house,” Thomas interrupted in a loud voice that cut through the argument, though his eyes were shut and his mouth was pressed into a thin line that suggested he regretted saying it. He gave a short, resigned sigh and opened his eyes, glancing to each of his companions in turn. “I have a house.”

  2

  Elton kept to back roads while he drove a new car they’d stolen from the motel parking lot, which was going to extend their already almost six-hour drive. Nathan had his arm dangling from the open passenger window, too tired even to fuss with the radio, and Thomas sat solemnly in the back seat beside Cora, staring out the window at the passing trees with his arms folded loosely across his stomach. Cora let what she felt was a very long time pass in sil
ence before the question finally burst from her lips.

  “Seriously, nobody’s going to say anything?”

  Thomas’s reflection in the window twisted into a scowl, but he didn’t look at her.

  “Nobody’s going to talk about Thomas having an ancestral witch-home in Salem.”

  “It’s just as likely a place to have an ancestral witch-home as anywhere else,” Nathan spoke up from the front. “None of that old nonsense had anything to do with real witchcraft.”

  “I mean, I’m not a historian, but the actual witch in the car whose house we’re going to might suggest otherwise, right?”

  “It is sort of an incriminating last name,” Elton added, briefly locking eyes with his glaring friend in the rearview mirror.

  “Is it?” Cora asked, and she leaned forward in her seat to try to catch Thomas’s gaze. “Is your family famous?”

  “The name may be famous, among people who care,” he admitted. “Whether that’s my family line or not, I don’t know. I never asked, and I don’t care. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it anymore.” When Thomas glanced sidelong at her as though expecting her probing to continue, she only smiled.

  “Thank you for doing this for us.”

  Thomas paused, then let out a small snort and leaned back against the car door to stare out the window.

  With only a couple of bathroom and snack breaks along the way, they made their way through the winding New England roads, skirting New York, Boston, and any other cities they got too close to for Elton’s comfort. Salem itself lay beyond seaside cliffs and tree-lined hills, just beside the endless water that looked cold even in spring. Thomas’s house sat at the top of a lonesome hill, surrounded by a wide yard edged by dense forest. It was a grim-looking place, broad and imposing, made of two stories of black wood and narrow windows. The only color Cora could see was the front door, which had been painted a bold red. It made for a pretty bleak picture, all alone in the woods.